The Monster Missions Read online

  “Weird,” Garth muttered, and I nodded in agreement.

  Tank took a sharp left and disappeared through a wide double doorway, and Kate motioned for us to follow him.

  “This is our dive room,” Kate said, standing aside so we could file through. I expected to see a similar setup to the scavengers’ dive room aboard the Atlas. There the dive equipment was stacked somewhat helter-skelter along the walls, and wet suits of various sizes and conditions of shabbiness hung along the wall on rusty hooks. This room had nothing shabby or helter-skelter about it. Along the back wall were open lockers, each one containing a full wet suit with flippers, face mask, and dive equipment. The floor was glossy and clean, with nothing but a few metal drains here and there, and on the far wall was a huge circular metal door.

  “Pretty sweet, right?” Kate said with a grin before launching into an explanation about the advanced technology the submarine used that allowed the Britannica’s divers to dive at a higher pressure than the divers aboard ships like the Atlas were able to. I was only half listening—there was something about that door that was drawing me to it like a magnet, and I walked over to run my hand over the thick metal that interlocked in the middle like a zipper.

  “That’s the hatch,” Kate said from directly behind me, making me jump. “We use it to exit the sub for underwater explorations. On the other side of that door is a chamber that fills with water and correctly pressurizes us before the outer door opens. I’d ask if you’re any good at diving, but the whole ship got to watch you two tangle with that hydra.” She let out a low whistle and shook her head. “Max would never admit it, but I think even he was impressed.”

  “So, about Max,” Garth said, crossing his arms to lean against one of the lockers. “Does he hate us for some special reason or does he just have a horrible personality?”

  Kate grimaced. “You’ll have to forgive him. He’s not usually quite that bad.”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” Garth said, raising an eyebrow. “But explain. Please.”

  Kate heaved a sigh and plopped down on one of the benches. Tank immediately vaulted up to sit beside her, and she ran a hand over his head absentmindedly as she studied us, obviously calculating just how much she was willing to reveal.

  “Max isn’t exactly excited to have you guys joining our team,” she finally said. “Mainly because of the reason there are spots available for the two of you.”

  “Is it because the other recruits got eaten?” Garth asked, and I shot him an annoyed look. “What?” he said defensively. “We’re on a sea-monster ship, or sub, or whatever. I feel like that’s a completely valid question. So,” he said, turning to Kate, “did they?”

  Kate shook her head. “No, but close. There was a boy named Luke who was Max’s best friend, and he and Max got in a bit of a tight spot with a makara that Weaver was trying to tag, and Luke almost didn’t survive it. Max messed up his foot pretty bad, and it still isn’t back to normal, which I think puts him in an even worse mood. As for Luke, he and another one of the recruits chose to leave the program. They were sent home two weeks ago.”

  “How often does that happen?” I said. “Someone getting sent home?”

  “Kind of a lot, actually,” Kate admitted. “Very few people can hack the kind of life we live, and Luke and Mary-Ann just couldn’t.”

  “So Max hates us for something we didn’t do and can’t change,” Garth said. “Sounds reasonable.”

  After that Kate led us out of the dive room and down yet another hallway, showing us the seawater-powered generator as well as the small gunnery stations used to defend the sub. She didn’t have to tell us what they might need to defend the sub against. Then the tour was over, and we were back at the front of the sub, looking out the glass-enclosed bow at the ocean.

  Kate glanced at her watch. “Weaver should be here any minute. Do you mind if I leave you two here? I need to report to my morning shift.”

  “Shift?” I said.

  “Our jobs,” Max said, coming up to stand next to us. “You’ll get assigned one too. After breakfast you usually have a morning duty, then class or a research diving mission followed by lunch, and then your afternoon duty, dinner, study time, and bed. This sub won’t maintain itself.”

  “Right,” I said, “of course not.”

  “Are these my newest recruits? The ones who single-handedly brought a ruby Hydramonsterus serpentinius to the bottom of the sea using nothing but a chain and a bag of junk?” said a voice from behind us, and we turned to see a short round man in a white lab coat walking toward us with open arms as though he was expecting a hug. He had a wide happy face with rosy red cheeks, and a head so bald and shiny it reflected the lights above our heads.

  “And you must be Professor Weaver,” Garth said, extending a hand.

  “It’s so, so wonderful to meet the both of you,” Weaver said as he pumped Garth’s hand enthusiastically.

  “It’s not that impressive,” I heard Max mutter. “All they did was put a bull’s-eye on that hunk-of-junk ship they came from.” A second later he let out a startled grunt, as though someone had shoved an elbow into his chest. I had one guess who’d done that.

  Weaver charged forward and grabbed my hand to shake it.

  “I’ve watched your video twenty times already,” he gushed. “I’m dying to know if a ruby hydra makes any kind of detectable noise before it attacks. A chatter or a chirp? Or even a song like a whale? Or maybe just a slight vibration in the water?”

  “Professor,” Kate said, leaning against the wall, “you should probably do their orientation before you start grilling them. Don’t you think?”

  Mr. Weaver shook his head and flapped his hands apologetically. “Of course, of course!” he said. “Here I am, getting ahead of myself again. This way, please. This way.” And with that he turned and bustled down a hallway.

  I felt a soft shove from behind and turned to see Kate motioning for me to follow him. “Hurry it up,” she whispered. “He’s probably already forgotten that you don’t know your way around here yet. Hustle!”

  We hustled, following the faster-than-he-appeared Weaver down hallway after hallway until we came to the red metal door Kate had pointed out to us earlier.

  “This is our classroom,” he said. I nodded, aware that my mouth was probably hanging open again as I did a slow circle to take in the room. Every single wall—if you could call them walls—was made up of a floor-to-ceiling stack of tanks and aquariums. Bright red and green frogs used suction-cup toes to crawl up the glass of one, while another appeared to have some sort of burnt-orange snake curled up inside. I saw turtles and sea stars, and a particularly toothy fish with one giant eye in the middle of its forehead, and so many other creatures I couldn’t have begun to identify.

  “This is wild,” Garth said as he leaned in to get a better look at a great, bulbous fish that seemed to glow in the dark.

  “Why, thank you,” Weaver said with a smile. “I take particular pride in this collection. Make sure you don’t touch that one, though. The hidden-fanged loogie may look harmless, but it has a specialized jaw with four rows of razor-sharp teeth. It bites first and asks questions later.”

  “It looks like a blob of snot with eyes,” Garth said.

  “What do you do with it all?” I said.

  “We study them,” Mr. Weaver said. “We feed them. We name them.” He pointed to a stern-looking turtle that was currently sunning itself on a rock under a orange heat lamp. “This is Phil,” he said. “The annoyed-looking seahorse over there is Bob, and his wife, Buela, is probably hiding somewhere in the weeds. She isn’t a fan of new students.”

  I bumped into something and looked down to see a long metal table situated in the middle of the small room. I took a seat, Garth grabbed the seat across from me, and we both turned to Weaver, who was busy fussing with a roll-down projector screen.

  “That seems kinda outdated for a place like this,” Garth muttered under his breath to me.

  “It is
very outdated. An antique, really. Or the grandmother of an antique,” Weaver said, making Garth jump guiltily. “However, I refused to give up any available real estate for the size of monitor I’d need in here,” Weaver explained. “This was my compromise.” He gave the screen one final jerk and it stayed in place. With a huff of satisfaction, he pulled out a small tablet and began tapping. A projector lit up over our heads, shooting a beam of light onto the screen, which was now obscuring five huge tanks from view, one of which, I was almost certain, contained some sort of two-headed snake.

  “What do you know about sea monsters?” Weaver asked as an antique map was suddenly projected onto the screen.

  “Well,” Garth said, “up until yesterday we didn’t even know they existed. So I’m going to go with not much.”

  “Same,” I said with a nod.

  “Okay,” Weaver said. “We’ll start with the basics. Sea monsters, sea serpents, monsters of the sea, whatever you want to call them, have been around since the dawn of time.”

  “‘The dawn of time’?” Garth repeated, eyebrow raised.

  “You’re right,” Weaver said, “that sounds overly fluffy. I’ve always liked the ring of ‘the dawn of time,’ though. Basically, as far back as the human race has recorded its history, there have been records of sea monsters. The problem is that over time these eyewitness accounts became the stuff of myth and legend, and a very dangerous thing happens when things become myth and legend.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “People stop believing they’re true,” Weaver said. The map in front of us was old—very old, if I had to guess—with Latin words written across the top in bold lettering. It showed a few land masses, but I noticed one was named Scandia. The land masses weren’t the interesting thing about the map, though—that was the monsters in the water. The cartographer had liberally filled the blue of the ocean with monsters of every shape and size. Some were whalelike, with flippers and a tail, but the comparison ended there, as their mouths opened to show rows of teeth, and hairlike tufts sprouted out around their heads like lions’ manes. Others were more snakelike, and one was in the process of taking down a minuscule ship.

  “That’s wild,” Garth said, his eyes wide. Suddenly he grabbed me and pointed down at the bottom left of the map. “Look, that’s our monster!” Sure enough there was the snakelike red monster that had attacked us. I stepped forward, looking at the eerie similarities between an illustration drawn hundreds of years ago and the creature I’d come face-to-face with only yesterday.

  “It is,” I breathed, stepping closer to the screen.

  “This map is the one we keep going back to,” Weaver said. “It was created in the 1500s, but we have successfully identified twelve of the monsters on this map, including your hydra.”

  Our first sea-monster lesson had officially begun. Some of the monsters were as old as time itself, legends that had been seen once and then forgotten as humans convinced themselves that they’d never existed. Others were new discoveries that had come to light after the Tide Rising, and I stared in awe as image after image appeared on the screen. Some depicted huge serpent-like coils unfurling among the waves, while others showed twenty-foot-long tentacles being launched over the bow of an unsuspecting ship. All of which the human race was utterly unprepared for, a fact that had turned from a nuisance to a crisis quickly after the Tide Rising forced everyone out onto the waves.

  It was around this time that the Coalition of the Sea, the governing body that formed after the continents were buried beneath the waves, commissioned the building of a fleet of submarines, including the Britannica, to work on finding a solution. They were sent out to the areas where the most sea-monster activity had been recorded. Weaver didn’t come right out and say it, but it was obvious from the way he talked about the Britannica that it was one of the best. From what I could tell, the submarines acted pretty independently, with only a little oversight and direction from the Coalition when needed.

  Weaver went on, talking about the recent discoveries they’d made from studying this monster or the other, and I felt a dull throbbing start behind my eyeballs. It was like trying to drink the entire ocean through a straw in a single day, and my brain hurt.

  “That’s the problem with mythical monsters,” Weaver concluded as we took one last look at the ancient map. “They are never content to stay in their legends.” With that he announced it was lunchtime, and he ushered us out of his classroom and toward the mess hall.

  “Is it really lunchtime already?” Garth said as we followed Weaver down the maze of hallways. I glanced at the tablet Mr. Weaver had given me. On it was a map of the Britannica, but it was the encyclopedia of sea monsters that really interested me. According to Weaver, the encyclopedia cataloged the monsters alphabetically, listing things like each monster’s approximate weight and size, the amount of young it produced, its estimated life span, and the number of recorded attacks.

  Weaver had already taught us a lot about the mysterious creatures, but despite the information overload, I realized that I still wanted—needed—to know more. I felt the itch to investigate that I usually only felt when I was tinkering with a new idea or invention. My grandpa would have said I was having a Ben Franklin moment, and he probably would have been right. There was something about this new flood of monster information that made my imagination buzz.

  “What do you think the food’s like on this thing?” Garth asked, jarring my attention back to the task at hand.

  “I have no idea,” I said. The familiar smell of roasting fish hit me a moment later, and my stomach woke up with an angry snarl. I glanced around as we entered the mess hall we’d seen briefly during our tour that morning, taking in the narrow tables, which at the moment were crammed with crew members. I tried to find Weaver, but he’d obviously forgotten about us and headed off to get his own lunch. The far wall of the mess hall was curved and made entirely of glass, similar to the hub, and I jumped as a huge great white shark swam past the window, its teeth so close to the glass I couldn’t believe they didn’t scratch it.

  “Now, that’s not something you see every day,” Garth said.

  “Hey! Newbies! Over here!” someone called to our left, and we both turned to see Kate waving an arm enthusiastically. A moment later she jumped out of her seat and bounded up to us. “Sit with us,” she said with a wide smile.

  “Sure,” Garth said, “but first, where do we get lunch? I’m starving.”

  “Whoops!” Kate said. “I forgot that you might not know that. Follow me.” She quickly ushered us to the other side of the room, where a small square window was cut into the wall. After a quick introduction to a friendly crew member named Brenda, we had our own steaming bowls of food in hand as we sat down with Kate. Max looked up from his own bowl just long enough to jerk his chin in a half-hearted greeting before returning his attention to his meal.

  “How was orientation?” Kate asked, blowing on her soup before taking a bite.

  “Interesting,” Garth said.

  “That’s an understatement and a half,” said Kate. “I remember just how weird that orientation with Weaver was. ‘Hi, welcome aboard, there are sea monsters everywhere and you’re going to help hunt them down.’” She shook her head. “Subtlety is not a strong point around here, and between you and me,” she said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “it just gets weirder.”

  “Lovely,” Garth said, digging in and taking a big spoonful of his soup. I followed suit and was pleasantly surprised. The food on board the Atlas was just okay: it had all the things you needed to stay alive and well nourished, but that was about all that could be said for it. This soup was actually good—great, even.

  “And how often do you, um, stumble upon sea monsters?” I asked.

  “More than you’d think,” Kate said. “When it comes to sea monsters, it turns out that you just have to know where to look. But since we are the youngest recruits, we don’t see as much action as the teenagers or the crew. Weaver let
s us go out on field trips after the fun is over sometimes, but for the most part you’ll spend the next few months watching and learning as much as you can.”

  “Kate’s lying,” Max said. “She’s trying not to freak you out any more on your first day, but we were on the team for the last three research dives as well as a recovery expedition after a ship got taken down by a terrible dogfish.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Isn’t that the sea monster in Pinocchio?”

  “Whoa,” Max said, raising an eyebrow. “The new girl may actually know her stuff.”

  “The new girl has a name,” I said. “It’s Berkley, and I wouldn’t go that far. Garth and I have a lot to learn.”

  Max sniffed, but his expression softened a little. “Right,” he said. “Well that monster isn’t just in fairy tales. It’s also infesting the North Atlantic.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s not five stories tall like the book says,” Kate said. “It also doesn’t have three rows of teeth.”

  “It has four,” Max said.

  “Really?” Kate said. “I thought it was five.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it’s only about two stories tall.”

  “Oh good. Only two stories,” Garth said, glancing over at me with a what did we get ourselves into? look.

  “So, when do you think we’ll see our first monster?” I asked.

  “That’s easy,” Kate said with a grin. “Tomorrow morning.”

  6

  I woke up and stared at the ceiling over my shallow bunk. Below me I could hear Garth’s thunderous snores weaving in and out of the chorus of breathing and grunting from the other sleepers, who slept stacked on top of one another like so many dishes in a cupboard. The night before, I’d briefly met the five teens who shared our bunk room, and I’d been happy to see that, unlike Max, they didn’t seem to have a problem sharing their space with new recruits. There were three girls and two boys, and from the way they joked around and teased one another while getting ready for bed, it was clear that they were friends.

  I’d glanced over at Max and noticed that he was watching the group with a kind of sad longing. He caught me looking and immediately adopted his now-familiar scowl, and I remembered what Kate had told us about how he’d lost his best friend. The odds were that he’d never see him again, not with the way the Britannica constantly zigzagged across the ocean. I wondered if he blamed himself for Luke’s decision to leave the program, and I had to keep myself from glancing at his injured foot. I could more than relate to that kind of guilt, and I decided that I was going to give Max and all his grumpiness a little more grace than he seemed to deserve. My dad had told me right after Mom died that sometimes when people were the most unlikable, they needed your kindness the most. Wallace had become a real jerk for a while after we lost Mom, but he’d eventually turned it around. Maybe Max was the same way.